Quantitative Analysis For Decision Makers 8th Edition

Help your students understand how quantitative analysis supports effective management decision-making in today''s fast-moving world

Quantitative Analysis for Decision Makers, 8th Edition, by Wisniewski, Shafti and Yeo provides an accessible introduction to the quantitative methods of analysis that are routinely used across the public and private sectors to support effective management decision making.

Adopting a learning-by-doing approach throughout, the text provides a clear explanation of each technique illustrating their practical application with the use of real data sets and with examples from government bodies and prominent businesses, including Google, Marks & Spencer, Tesla, Netflix, WWF and many more.

The text is suitable for business and management undergraduate and postgraduate students and for MBA students taking a quantitative course as part of their studies.

The new edition offers:

• Updated case illustrations from global business organisations like Tesla, Netflix, WWF, Google, Unilever
• Extended discussion of how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts on quantitative analysis and decision making.
• Updated ‘QADM in action’ case studies illustrating how organisations benefit from the use of analytical techniques in the real world.
• Coverage of recent developments such as Big Data and business analytics; multi-criteria decision analysis and data mining; agent-based simulation; data visualisation.
• Examples and cases have been updated to reflect global events such as the Covid pandemic and geopolitical uncertainties.
• Fully worked examples and exercises supported by Excel data sets to show how to approach a particular problem using the techniques

About the authors:

Mik Wisniewski has almost five decades of experience in Quantitative Analysis. He has taught at a number of leading universities, worked in both industry and government and has extensive consultancy experience in the UK and across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Dr Farhad Shafti is a senior academic with expertise in Management Science. He has extensive experience teaching in highly ranked universities, covering undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA studies in the UK and overseas.

Dr Wee Meng Yeo is a senior lecturer at Adam Smith Business School, Glasgow. He has considerable expertise in the areas of operations management, forecasting and inventory control and has worked in the UK and the Far East.

Pearson, the world''s learning company.

1. 1 Introduction

• Decisions, decisions and more decisions
• Data, information and analysis
• So where does quantitative analysis fit in?
• So who uses quantitative analysis?
• What’s quantitative analysis got to do with managers and with me?
• Models in quantitative decision making
• Using the text
• Summary

1. 2 Tools of the Trade

• Some basic terminology
• Fractions, proportions, percentages
• Rounding and significant figures
• Common notation
• Powers and roots
• Logarithms
• Summation and factorials
• Equations and mathematical models
• Graphs
• Log graphs
• Real and money terms
• Worked example
• Summary
• Exercises

1. 3 Presenting Management Information

• A business example
• Bar charts
• Pie charts
• Frequency distributions
• Percentage and cumulative frequencies
• Histograms
• Frequency polygons
• Ogives
• Lorenz curves (Pareto diagrams)